The hotel has fallen silent. There are few other guests staying here and it’s not yet late; people are out eating, drinking, generally having fun. Daniel has decided to return to the pub alone. It’s a relief to have this time to himself. For the first time since leaving the flat Alex feels able to reclaim his own destiny. For the first time he has no idea what is about to happen. The strange madness of these premonitions, visions, whatever they are, has intensified to the point where he fears he might be losing his mind.
Is all this just déjà vu? And what is déjà vu exactly? A fleeting sense that what is currently happening has happened before, never possible to pin down. Sensory messages entering the brain in the wrong order, the subconscious before the conscious so that things being experienced appear to be already in memory – caused in his case by some perverse cross-wiring resulting from his head injury, or the drugs he’s taken. If so, then these are no more than illusions, nothing to fear: with no genuine power to predict. Could he have actually directed them to the hotel, even though he seemed to know every hedgerow, every turning, every house on the high street? Could he have described the school before they found it, even though nothing about it surprised him? Could he have pointed out which pub table they would eat at, or say in advance what food they would be ordering, even though he felt he had the words on his lips just moments before Daniel spoke them? Impossible to say. All he knows is that the effect is perturbing, disorientating and totally exhausting. Like a play he’s already seen. He seems to know everyone’s lines, learned all their moves; a theatre of the absurd. And only now, left alone in this room, has the curtain finally come down.
Even on the drive here the natural order of things had seemed upside down. Watching those white lines in the headlights, the way ahead had appeared so clear, so certain. In the rear view mirror the weaker taillights had left the road already travelled to fade into obscurity. After that long tailback they’d encountered he’d watched the approaching cars speeding towards a future that to them was quite unknown, to him certain. Their future was his past. And before the roadworks the reverse had been true – those on the other carriageway had been all-knowing that his and Daniel’s fate was to plough blindly into the oncoming jam.
He feels tired now. He must sleep if he is to be ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow they are going to find the coast path that will take them to the spot where he fell. His sense (if that can be in any way trusted) is that it will change everything. It will finally tell him where he has spent the last twenty-four years; how and why he’d found his way to his mother’s graveside; how he could have known about her illness and death and where she was buried. And what had left him in this physically sub-human, mentally strangely super-human condition.
As his eyelids drop, the near-dark hotel room gives way to the dim light of the village pub. A crowd of locals surround him. His senses are somewhat numbed by drink. Outside again now, breathing the night air, the steady clop of hard shoes on tarmac taking him up a short road into blackout, then turning him around and sending him the other way towards a green. Approaching an obelisk; some kind of monument. Reading names inscribed into stone. Growing anger at not finding the name he is looking for…
…Suddenly, there is birdsong and daylight pouring in through the hotel window.